Self-dependence and self-care activities of the elderly are essential for maintaining their state of health, well-being and quality of life. In this regard, systems and methods have been proposed for monitoring an assessment of ability/disability of patients or elderly persons that are cognitively unimpaired with a decreasing ability to perform self-care activities.
Such systems and methods are proposed to assess disability based on appointment by a profession who uses questionnaires and/or medical tests designed for that purpose. These assessments are, however, only punctual, rare and/or sporadic measurements of the patient's ability and thus cannot capture accurately the trends of self-care disability. Therefore, such system and methods lead often to a delay of support, as the moment when the patient starts needing supporting is not captured. Consequently, this causes increased risk of the occurrence of an adverse event or even an accident.
Moreover, the systems and methods known from the art focus on providing solutions starting from the premises that a deficiency in performing self-care activities has already been established. The disadvantage of this approach is that this usually becomes apparent and happens after the occurrence of an adverse event, such as after the patient has fallen in the bath tub.
US 2004/0147817 A1 discloses a system and method for assessing a functional or medical ability of an actor in an environment. The system is configured to retrieve data from a plurality of data sources and to automatically evaluate a functional or medical ability of the actor based upon information from the retrieved data. Furthermore, the system is configured to assign information from the data sources to baseline function categories.
Further systems and/or methods are known from Se Lawton et al. “Assessment of Older People: Self Maintaining and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living”, The Gerontologist 1969; 9:179-86, and from Howell, Sandra C. “Assessing the function of the aging adult”, The Gerontologist 8.1 Part 1 (1968): 60-62. Still further systems and/or methods are known from the website “http://www.agingcare.com/Products”.